Organizations rely on computing systems to manage business processes. Generally, the complexity of these computing systems increases with the number and sophistication of the processes being managed. Enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and business suite systems that interface with other business systems, such as inventory management systems and accounting systems tend to be relatively complex systems with thousands of customizable settings that may be changed depending on particular business needs.
As new systems are integrated into an organization, or existing systems are upgraded, these configurable settings may have to be changed in not only any new systems being added, but also sometimes in existing systems of the organization in order to fully integrate the new functionality offered by the new system. Because of the large number of settings that may have to be configured, integration of these systems may be time consuming and resource intensive. To minimize the integration costs associated with configuring settings, automated programs have been developed to verify the configuration of settings in new and existing systems.
However, these automated programs only perform a basic check of configuration settings. Once the program detects a configuration setting that is unsupported or inconsistent, the automated program is terminated and the unsupported configuration settings must be manually reconciled. Furthermore, subsequent configuration settings that have not been processed due to the termination of the automated program must also be manually examined and reconciled. These limitations associated with automated configuration verification programs have limited their usefulness and practicality.
There is a need for automated configuration verification programs that can automatically correct inconsistent and unsupported configuration settings and continue processing subsequent configuration settings with minimal user intervention.